Topic on Talk:Superman/Characters/Superman

This was a false accusation of plagiarism, and the mod who made it has apologized.

@SmileyB: This page really should be deleted outright because it is riddled with copyright violations. I did delete the description of Superman because it was a word-for-word copy of what's at TVT. But a lot of this page is original, which is what saved it -- for the moment.

However, many of the trope entries have content that is not original -- sentences that are lifted directly from TV Tropes' counterpart to this page. This puts us in violation of the law, and this page in violation of our Copyright policy. In particular, this passage:

Finally, please note that there is no amount of meaningful text "too small" to qualify as copyright violation. If it can be identified as originating from TV Tropes, it is a violation. Yes, this means something as small as replacing an image caption with one from TV Tropes counts. If there is any doubt or uncertainty about the attribution of a change, we will automatically err on the side of caution, to protect All The Tropes from legal liability.

Because so much of this page doesn't break the law I'm giving you a chance to clean it up. You have 48 hours -- to be generous, call it noon EDT on Friday 19 March 2021. If the page still has passages copied word-for-word from TV Tropes on it at that time, it will be deleted to protect the wiki from legal liability.

-- Looney Toons, admin

CC: @Labster, @Robkelk, @QuestionableSanity, @Derivative, @SelfCloak, @GethN7

OK. I'm am going to calm down and try to start this civil. All I did was copy from the original source page on this site. You need to check your own site first rather than talk about giving me the benefit of the doubt. Important fact about me, I go from 0 to break things pissed off when i am accused of doing things i didn't do.

So....DO NOT SLING ACCUSATIONS AT ME UNLESS YOU VERIFY FIRST. I DO NOT TAKE KINDLY TO THAT. CHECK ON YOUR OWN SITE BEFORE YOU START UP ON ME.

Now, I am giving YOU the benefit of the doubt that you are so busy that you didn't the time to check or it didn't occur to you that I COPIED FROM THIS SITE'S PAGE TO MAKE THE PAGE IN QUESTION. IT IS NOT MY OBLIGATION TO MAKE SURE THE PAGES ON YOUR SITE AREN'T PLAGIARIZED. IF YOU'RE A MOD, THAT IS YOUR JOB.

I am, at the moment, justifiably pissed. I will calm down and wait for you response. Keep in mind what you've accused me of, how I told you I react to false accusations, and the tone of this response because how you respond will dictate whether I respond amicably or my next message will be laidened with expletives and extremes that would make Hunter S. Thompson proud.

This is perhaps the most unwise response that could've been formulated.

EDIT: To elaborate, there is absolutely nothing mandating that you type angry. I would rather you take a step back and civilly - maybe not calmly, that's not always so easy, but at least civilly - assess the situation and realize: just because someone is a mod who isn't actively trying to lord their authority over other users, this doesn't mean that said mods in return can be treated as disposable janitors, and you certainly should not attempt ultimatums with them... much less invoking Hunter S. Thompson's image for something that more than likely will not even come close to it should you disregard this text and continue on this inadvisable course anyhow.

Beyond that, ATT is a community effort - the emphasis being on community. We are all responsible for this wiki in some shape or form, and while it may not be your fault if the infringing material in question was already present on this site (or else from a pre-fork period of TVT) it would be a wise and proactive thing to clarify such and avoid just that kind of mix-up from the get-go. Perhaps noting in the edit summary, for starters, would have been the play.

Missing the point. Seriously missing the point. I had no idea it was plagiarism. Would have no way of knowing that. I wasn't editing the page just separating information. I literally changed nothing because i assumed (silly me) that someone else was doing their job. So, let me clarify because, again, i am so sick of people not even starting with manners, my problem with Looney Toons is that this is how the message should have started:

"Hello Smiley. I just checked the page you added. Did you take it from another site or from here? Please let me know as it seems to be copied verbatim from TVtropes. If you got it from this site, that's important and I'll have to flag the original page for tidying up so as to comform to our copyright standards. Thanks for your attempt at organizing but the page will have to come down until we can get this settled. Please get back to me at the earliest. I appreciate your efforts and I sure there was no ill intent on your part."

See the difference in tone and intent? I have run groups and message boards to. You start friendly and you make damn sure there no, I repeat, NO accusatory language in there. There were no pleases, thank yous, or even acknowledgements that this was an honest mistake other than a condescending throwaway line about the benefit of the doubt at the end.

Manners cost nothing and respect starts with respect.

@SmileyB:

You are correct. I owe you an apology. My only excuse is that I saw no deletion from the parent page, nor did your edit summary say it was copied from the parent page, and I had no reason to suspect that it was a transplant within the wiki.

You need to understand that we deal with entire pages cut and pasted from TVT on an all-too-frequent basis, from both drive-by editors and even established long-time contributors (although the latter is fortunately rare). With no information to the contrary visible in the Recent Changes page, this looked exactly like one of those. Under most circumstances, Recent Changes is all I have to go by -- and on most days I have a lot of it to get through, and I look at almost every change. From my point of view an entire subpage appearing out of the blue with no corresponding deletion from a parent page is suspicious. Had you deleted the material you transplanted I would have gone "oh, okay" and moved on.

Regardless, the point remains that I made an error, falsely accused you, and threatened moderator action against you. I apologize for the error and its consequences.

-- Looney Toons, admin

CC: @Labster, @Robkelk, @QuestionableSanity, @Derivative, @SelfCloak, @GethN7

I appreciate that and thank you for the apology. I don't mind someone asking me if i did or didn't do something. I don't even mind criticism if it's constructive and coming from a genuine desire to help me. I understand you have to deal with this stuff day in and day out and it takes a toll and after having to deal with all of this you're reflex is to assume the worst. I don't believe or feel that you have any personal issues with me and I certainly don't with you. In the future I will always leave notes about what I am doing in the description section so as to not give anyone the wrong impressions. I appreciate that you are doing a, most likely, thankless job that never the less needs to be done. I will try not to react so strongly in the future and try to get some clarification about issues before it turns into something ugly. I actually have a lot of patience. i teach small children. But I think it also tends to have me more critical of adults because I and I am certain you have had to deal with adults they behave more immaturely and entitled than children. I am trying to do my best here to organize pages and add new content. i want to assure you that I enjoy writing, take it seriously and would only ever add my own original content. That is probably also why i was so angry at being accused of plagiarism. I apologize for my knee jerk reaction and while my anger was justified, letting my emotions control me was not. I will keep doing my best to work with the moderators and I hope to at the least keep an amicable relationship with everyone in the future.

"I had no idea it was plagiarism. Would have no way of knowing that."

That's why I acknowledged it in my response. ATT's had a lot of pages collecting dust for a long while, so it's very reasonable that this could have been the case - and look at that, it was! It's one of my personal nightmare scenarios and why I'm personally skittish sometimes when it comes to editing here. Better safe than sorry after all!

This is why we have the policies we do -- mistakes happen, on everyone's part, and we want to ensure no one finds themselves tossed out on their ear because of a mistake. And note that even genuine cases of copyright violation -- first offenses, at least -- get nothing more than a warning along with the page deletion. Smiley was never in danger of a ban for this, and as long as clear channels of communication are maintained, you personally should never need fear sanction for good-faith efforts either.

We're not TV Tropes. We're not Fighteer. You're not going to get banned for an honest mistake, or because you dotted your "i"s the wrong way, or because we're in a pissy mood and want to take it out on someone. We wrote our rules to prevent that kind of thing. If you've never read it, check out our Policy for Wiki Staff, which Rob linked to below.

Looking at all of this after the fact, I see a couple of things that I want to comment on as a moderator.

First, tempers ran high all around. Thank you to everyone for being willing to step back and calm down a bit, letting ire turn to righteous anger. And thank you to @Umbire the Phantom for attempting to deescalate the situation.

@SmileyB, your response to @Looney Toons was correct - you called us out for making a mistake. This is actually in the rules here - specifically, Rule 10 of the Policy for Wiki Staff. The all-caps was a bit much, though, in my opinion. All-caps is traditionally seen as "shouting" on the Internet, especially by old fogeys like myself.

Looney Toons, thank you for apologizing.

Going forward... When we're creating pages that are made up of information moved from existing pages, we should specifically say so in the edit summary. (For example, adding the phrase "Created with content moved from Superman/Characters" to the summary in this particular case.) That would show up-front that anything on the new page that happens to be an exact copy of TV Tropes text was here before the new page was created. This isn't mentioned specifically anywhere in our policies or guidelines - we just ask that people provide an edit summary - but I'm beginning to think it should be.

Took me like a hour but i redid the superman page with my description of the character. I copied most of the tropes from TVtropes but removed the descriptions. It's not plagiarism for just copying the list of terms/names of the tropes right? I'll add more in time coming. Hope this helps and that people will also add on to it.

That was unnecessary... As it was text from the parent page, which was acquired during the fork, it was all legal. You didn't have to rewrite anything. But to answer your question; no, the list of applicable tropes isn't copyrightable, only the descriptions of how they apply.

Sorry about that. But I think this might be a good way to add pages while avoiding plagiarism. The important thing is that the descriptions be original writing. It definitely helps having the list already written on another page. I'm not sure about others but I see copying the list as a short cut not a rip-off and it definitely cuts down on the time to figure out which tropes to write.

The important thing is that the descriptions be original writing.

Agreed. Not only does that protect everybody, it also helps show that there's a difference between TV Tropes and All The Tropes.

Although we have renamed a few tropes over the years, so it's best to double-check that we still have all of the tropes under the same names.